Bevilacqua.us

I was an early adopter of the Logitech Revue Google TV appliance. Honestly, I was excited when I first read that Google and Logitech had teamed up to bring an HD experience to my already rockin A/V system. At the time, TV’s were not yet “smart”. And today, they are getting smarter. However, if you know me, and know my belief in the one component per application method (even one program per function, think UNIX), then you know I’d rather have a HTPC than something poorly integrated into another A/V component. This is why I used MythTV for almost a decade until it became unmaintainable with too many technological breakthroughs such as ever increasing resolutions and connections. And I clearly knew that the market for a well engineered, embedded HTPC was a promising one.

So, here’s my list. Explanations are below in case you need them elaborated.

1- The wireless keyboard / mousepad

2- The built-in IR blaster

3- The minimality and simplicity of the base design

4- The ease of setup and component changes

5- It works with Media Tomb

6- It’s the best interface to Netflix in an A/V setup

7- It comes with Google TV and Chrome

8- Picture in Picture when used with another source

9- The promise of future apps to enhance the system

10- I paid $299 for it

Elaborations:

1- In a large sized room, the wireless has never failed me. I can bring the easily portable, minimal battery using keyboard just about anywhere within that room

2- IR blasting is possibly the best idea as, with multiple components and LED displays on them, I choose to keep my media cabinet closed

3- A small, black box with two green LEDs. Half the length and width of a standard blu-ray player and about the same height

4- Imagine all the work of setting up a universal remote done for you

5- If you have a basic understand of Linux file server setup, codecs, transcoding and muxing, you should have no issues in playing your digital media

6- If you can’t stand on screen keyboard and hunting for each letter or number when searching for a Netflix title, you’ll find the full keyboard a Godsend

7- It’s a fully functional web browser (with the exception of Hulu, which is not Google or Logitech’s fault)

8- You can easily setup anything as a secondary source (cable, blu-ray/dvd) and use it as PiP to use the Chrome while watching TV. Pretty nifty!

9- I’m looking forward to the Home Automation apps so I can have one keyboard to control A/V and lights for the cost of the hardware

10- Yeah, I paid full price for it, best to be patient (and intelligent) with it…

As a sub note to 5, here’s the codecs the Logitec Media Player currently supports:

Videos: WMV (VC-1) (.asf .wma .wmv), WMV (VC-1) + WMA (.asf .wma .wmv), WMV + WMA (.avi), Xvid (H-264) + AAC (.avi),
Xvid (H-264) + AAC (.mp4), Xvid (H-264) + AAC (.mt2s .mt2), Xvid (MPEG4part2) + AAC (.avi), Xvid (MPEG4part2) + MP3 (.avi)

… ehem, you are probably thinking I forgot the whole audio angle. I didn’t. I use AirTunes to stream to my A/V rig. But yes, this is a serious deficiency. Play lists should be easily created from a networked library. iTunes doesn’t do this well, especially when iTunes lives on a traveling laptop. Which is all the more reason to have it static on a file server and playable by a well engineered front end.

..but then, a photo is worth a thousand words:

My rig consists of an Integra 8.9, a Samsung Blu-ray, a Logitech Revue, two Aperion Intimus 5B speakers and the Sharp Aquos Quattron LC-60C8470U.

Summary

If someone needs to contact me they can call or text me from one unchanging number and Google Voice sends those calls to anywhere I might be and if missed Google Voice sends the voice mails (transcribed even, if they speak strict Northern English) or text’s to my primary email. Replying to a text is as simple as using the smart phone’s browser and navigating to voice.google.com. And it even works on my very old Blackberry 8330. But the best part is Google Voice is completely free of charge to me and combines with my Google Apps for my Domain account.

This free service has proved to be invaluable to me after moving out into an area that gets no cell reception for miles. If someone needs to contact me, it’s pretty much guaranteed I will get the message via my Internet connection as long as it is up. And these days, there is little issue with that, even out here in the deep sticks.

Setup Guide

1) Setup a Google Voice account. The details of this are outside the scope of this guide. The best I can say is to make sure you use an email account that you can access from your phone. GMail uses IMAP. So, if this is going to be an issue, just setup a new GMail account you can dedicate to Google Voice. This matters!

- You’ll choose a phone number that will become your primary number. Try to choose a local number to your residency. Try to remember that you want to never change this number again, so get a number that is simple.

- You will have to eliminate all voice mail systems to the phones that you want to forward calls to. Google Voice takes care of the Voice Mail from here on out. And you don’t want to miss Voice Mails by having it go to somewhere you might forget to check.

2) Once setup, go to Settings -> Voicemail & Text. Set Voicemail Notifications and Text Forwarding to send to your email address. For Text Forwarding, this will only send to the address you created the account with, so make sure you can use IMAP or whatever to get to the account from your smart phone (as I mentioned earlier). Else, you will not get alerted when you get new text messages.

3) Now that you are setup, create a email filter on your smart phone that alerts you with a sound and/or vibration when you receive email with the following specifications:

Sent from @txt.voice.google.com
Subject line contains “SMS from”

Note that on a Blackberry, it’s simpler to hit another email address dedicated to text and voice alerts. That way, all new emails alert purely as Google Voice.

4) Finally, to send or reply to text messages, you’ll want to create a bookmark in your smart phone’s browser that will go to http://voice.google.com and login automatically. Once inside, you will see two links, one for Quick Call (or Call) and one for Text. Clicking ‘Text’ will put you into a screen where you can specify the phone number to send a text to and the message you want to send.

Beyond that, you’ll want to setup your voice mail options and your additional phones to forward to. But that’s beyond the scope of this guide. Google Voice makes it simple enough so I don’t see you having any issues. Good luck!

” Vim syntax file
” Put this file into /usr/share/vim/vim/syntax/
” in ~/.vimrc: autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.todo set filetype=todo
” Language: Bev’s todo files
” Maintainer: Michael Bevilacqua
” Last Change: 2012-2-15
” Version: 1

if exists(“b:current_syntax”)
finish
endif

setlocal iskeyword+=:
setlocal background=light
syn case ignore

” red
syn region todoSub start=/^s: / end=/\n/
” blue
syn region todoNote start=/^n: / end=/\n/
” purple
syn region todoCode start=/^c: / end=/\n/
” yellow
syn region todoAction start=/^a: / end=/\n/

highlight link todoSub String
highlight link todoNote Comment
highlight link todoCode Macro
highlight link todoAction Keyword

let b:current_syntax = “todo”

In the same park as the Time Warner Data Center and Corporate Offices is an old building now in the works of being demolished. It’s the L. H. Lincoln building that used to do leather tanning. It’s considered a hazmat cleanup as well from what I read on the web. And that the future plans might be related to the “fracking” happening in this area, natural gas compression into LNG. Which seems obvious as after the downfall of Adelphia, this town is dying a slow, painful death and would be very dead without the likes of Shell’s drilling campaign and the last of the technical institutions; Verizon, Level 3, Zito Media and Time Warner Cable.

I recently moved this domain back to my favorite registrar Gandi.net after finding out Go Daddy supports SOPA. I also discovered horror stories such as:

“for a few hours around christmas when a bunch of people were transferring away they halted transfers and tried to ask for notarized documents to transfer domains”

Unbelievable.

What really gets me is that I had to ask a friend if there were any other hidden gotcha’s to GoDaddy.com transfer system. She kindly suggested a Google search – I found this at:

http://www.lodesys.com/blog/2009/godaddy.php

How to NAT a wireless LAN and a wired LAN in Ubuntu:

Configure your wlan as you normally would.

Install dnsmasq which will forward your local DNS to wired clients:

apt-get install dnsmasq

Manually configure eth0 without a gateway in NetworkManager to 192.168.0.1/255.255.255.0 (or a free subnet) using this local ip also as your DNS setting.

Reboot then check with ifconfig to make sure it is correct.

Then configure the NAT as follows:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

This should work immediately. Attempt to connect to a host from another wired host.

Note: Local computers connecting via eth0 should be configured manually and use 192.168.0.1 as their DNS and Gateway

——————–

To automate, simply put this into /etc/rc.local

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE

Uncomment the line “net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1″ in /etc/sysctl.conf

Your NAT will persist after reboots.

So, I have an Ubuntu 10x laptop that I want to run as a Synergy Server. Setup is actually quite simple, but don’t follow the docs for GDM or .xsession as they will fail. What you want to do is, as your user, go to System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications and add the following:

Name: Synergy Server

Command: /usr/bin/synergys

Comment: Synergy Server

On login, this will read your ~/.synergy.conf which in my case looks like:

mbevilacqua@mb:~$ cat .synergy.conf

section: screens
	mb:
	mb0:
end

section: links
       mb:
         right = mb0
       mb0:
         left  = mb
       end

Debian alternatives is a system that allows you to choose your favorite applications to be called by default from many other programs. Even if you install VIM enhanced, it will be linked to VIM.basic in alternatives. The trick is to set vim.basic for each alternative you want linked to it. This fixes commonly used programs such as visudo and crontab -e to use VIM.

To do so, run update-alternatives –all and set the programs you want to vim.basic.